JAPANESE OPERATION C

How does the Axis and Allies community judge Japan’s Operation C, also known as the Indian Ocean Raid? What results would have happened had the British Forces A and B combined and meet the Japanese Combine Fleet?

Can you link some more info ? Idk a whole lot about it other than “Kuroshima” ? was in charge and it was about 6 months after Pearl Harbor. It was also successful tactically at least.

Idk much about the British forces available. If the ones in Singapore the Brits would probably have gotten their ass kicked. I know there was a battle soon after Pearl harbor with Dutch,US and British, not sure if any Australia, and that didn’t turn out too good for the allies.

Anyway, I think logistics probably would of doomed them even if they had taken Madagascar. Doubtful the Italians or Kriegsmarine could have helped much. A sound strategy otherwise, imo : )

A Japanese base in Madagaskar would have closed the US Lend/Lease route named the Persian Corridor from US to USSR, as well as the Middle East oil going the other way, so I dont think US would allowed that. In fact UK did attack the Vichy garrison there in May 1942, to deny Japan access to Madagaskar. Its a pretty long way from Japan, so I cant figure how they should have done it, its hardly doable in an A&A game, and in the real world you got the supply chain too

Japan had the overwhelming initaitve at that point in the war, and tore the British forces they found apart. Had they confronted the other large UK ships, they may have shared that fate and were withdrawn to africa.

The Japanese did not have the long range power projection needed to grab all these targets; but Ceylon would have been next, taking that naval base key, then also confronting UK forces in Africa. Assuming that there were not more pressing matters (the USA), they might have tried taking Madagascar. Would have been a cool twist on history, but I don’t see the Japanese going further and affecting the Mediterranian war, more likely they would have done mischief to Allied shipping between to Austraila and Asia and the Lend Lease corridor the others mentioned.

but without having a decisive effect on the overall war, it would have been abandoned as the losses in the Pacific war increased…

Ceylon and Madagascar do indeed occupy strategic positions in the Indian Ocean, but in order for a hypothetical Japanese occupation of these islands to have had a serious effect on the Allies the Japanese would have had to establish large and well-equipped naval and air bases there, keep them regularly supplied with food and fuel and ammunition, and defend them against Allied countremeasures (such as blockade and/or invasion). Considering how far these islands are from Japan, and considering how much trouble Japan (which had an inadequate marchant shipping capacity and inadequate convoy defenses) had with the logistical support of its much-closer holdings in the Pacific, I doubt that a large-scale, long-term Japanese presence in the Indian Ocean would have been a realistic proposition. Note by the way that Japan did occupy the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which are south of Burma and west of Thailand; the effects of this occupation were marginal (except to the local population) and by the end of the war the garrison was starving.

Japan had no interest in invading Africa, they knew that UK had that on lockdown and they didn’t have the resources to do it. I am 100% sure that Japanese High Command would of double down on invading Australia over that. The idea behind controlling Indian ocean was to do two jobs. First: Close Burma Road since the Chinese were getting heavy equipment from the US. People forget the bulk of the IJA was in China and China was always the end goal for Japan. Two: Cutting the Persian trade route was more of a request from Germany. People forget that the Battle of Madagascar was the only battle during WWII that had both Germany and Japan in the same battle.

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I don’t think the operation would have been successful for a number of reasons. There was still the Royal Navy, something that would have made any landing difficult at best, impossible at worst. There were more of them to begin with and were pretty decent ships. I think maybe, from my POV, that one reason would have made any landing very costly for the Germans, and those troops that did survive would have had to deal with resistance of some sort after that.

@CWO:
A similar situation existed in the Confederacy in the early stages of the U.S. Civil War, where it was believed that the material advantages of the North (in terms of industrial capacity, natural resources and sheer population numbers) could be overcome by (if I recall the quote correctly) “the gallantry and fighting spirit of the Southern Gentleman.” The contrary (and ultimately correct) view was expressed by a certain Northerner to a friend he had in the Confederacy: “No nation of agriculturalists has ever defeated a nation of industrialists. You are bound to fail.”
That’s an excellent example. I looked up the Civil War and found that the North experienced twice as many combat deaths as the South. That ratio would seem to partially justify Southern leaders’ faith in their strategy. However, the overall ratio of military deaths was 1.4 to 1. The reason for this is that so many soldiers on both sides died from disease, exposure, and other causes.
Later in the war, the North increasingly benefited from activities which did not necessarily involve a clash between the main Northern and Southern armies. The increasingly effective naval blockade is a good example of this, as are some of the coastal raids the North performed later in the war. The Southern economic collapse which resulted from the naval blockade is still another example. Later in the war, Grant capitalized on the Northern advantage in manpower by sending several secondary forces to invade the South, while the main Southern forces were occupied by their Northern counterparts.

@221B:
I had to vote other as I think a good proximity fuse ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze )could have made a tremendous difference in the naval battles the Japanese lost.Â It certainly made a difference for the Americans.
There is no doubt that Japanese Anti Aircraft were the poorest of the major nations of WW2. Only Rabaul had any success in air defense, and this was due to the massive amount of Allied bombing missions on that target and the practice the Japanese gunners gained. Rabaul would claim 500 aircraft, mostly singing engine bombers.
The Japanese would use several warship superstructures that were sunk to create " flak towers".
The allies who cleared the sky’s of the south pacific of Japanese planes and bombed at will anything desired dreadful hated missions to bomb Rabaul.

@KurtGodel7:
@Gargantua:
With that said Kurt Godel…
That makes Jodl innocent. But also… dead, by execution.
Thus, the United States government is guilty of Murder? Or is it the internationally community that is to blame?
The Allies conducted Soviet-style show trials after the war, against both the Germans and Japanese.
Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Harlan Fiske Stone called the Nuremberg trials a fraud. “(Chief U.S. prosecutor) Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg,” he wrote. “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”[61]
Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October 1945 told U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.”[62][63]
Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of “substituting power for principle” at Nuremberg. “I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled,” he wrote. “Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time.”[64]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials#Criticism
The above-described trials resulted in a very different outcome than might have been expected, had the trials been conducted by a trustworthy neutral government. (In contrast, the Allied governments which conducted the trials had a strong vested interest in making the Nazis look as bad as possible. The worse the Nazis looked, the better the Allied governments would look for having beaten them.) Also, there is this quote from The Guardian, one of Britain’s most prestigious newspapers:
Official documents discovered last month at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, show that the London Cage was a secret torture centre where German prisoners who had been concealed from the Red Cross were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with execution or with unnecessary surgery.
As horrific as conditions were at the London Cage, Bad Nenndorf was far worse. . . . Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency. . . .
The Foreign Office briefed Clement Attlee, the prime minister, that “the guards had apparently been instructed to carry out physical assaults on certain prisoners with the object of reducing them to a state of physical collapse and of making them more amenable to interrogation”. . . .
Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered “perfectly proper”, on the grounds that such threats were never carried out. . . .
One victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar, who swallowed the spoon handle to escape. An anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. "I never in all those two years had undergone such treatmdescribed tactics would have been used to extort confessions for use at the Nuremberg Trials.
@KurtGodel7:
@Gargantua:
With that said Kurt GNuremberg," he wrote. “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”[61]
Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October 1945 told U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.”[62][63]
Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of “substituting power for principle” at Nuremberg. “I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled,” he wrote. “Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time.”[64]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials#Criticism
The above-described trials resulted in a very different outcome than might have been expected, had the trials been conducted by a trustworthy neutral government. (In contrast, the Allied governments which conducted the trials had a strong vested interest in making the Nazis look as bad as possible. The worse the Nazis looked, the better the Allied governments would look for having beaten them.) Also, there is this quote from The Guardian, one of Britain’s most prestigious newspapers:
Official documents discovered last month at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, show that the London Cage was a secret torture centre where German prisoners who had been concealed from the Red Cross were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with execution or with unnecessary surgery.
As horrific as conditions were at the London Cage, Bad Nenndorf was far worse. . . . Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency. . . .
The Foreign Office briefed Clement Attlee, the prime minister, that “the guards had apparently been instructed to carry out physical assaults on certain prisoners with the object of reducing them to a state of physical collapse and of making them more amenable to interrogation”. . . .
Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered “perfectly proper”, on the grounds that such threats were never carried out. . . .
One victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar, who swallowed the spoon handle to escape. An anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. "I never in alldescribed tactics would have been used to extort confessions for use at the Nuremberg Trials.
I don’t see a problem here
the nazis got what they deserved

I’d never heard of this operation, but it sounds typically Churchillian. He had great fondness – in both World Wars – for schemes that aimed blows at the outer fringes of enemy territory rather than hitting the enemy head-on (in the Ulysses S. Grant style favoured by the Americans). In WWI, Churchill dreamed up the Gallipoli operation for this reason; it was poorly planned and badly botched, and his reputation took a hit as a result. In WWII, Churchill pushed hard for the invasion of Italy; the fallacy of his argument that Italy was the “soft underbelly of Europe” should have been obvious to anyone able to spot mountain ranges on a topographical map. Churchill’s Baltic operation also has a few echoes of Jacky Fisher’s WWI plan to invade Germany via the Baltic, for which Fisher conceived the misguided Courageous-class battlecruisers – severely unbalanced ships with the armament of a battleship but the armour protection of a light cruiser.